Second thoughts, wishes about the double-murder

The familiar phrase, evoking the melancholy of missed opportunity, will be my last words on a double-murder case that has wrung North Country dry of emotion.

Honestly, there’s nothing left to feel. But there’s still plenty to think about.

In how many ways could tragedy have been diverted by intelligent human, if not divine, intervention?

How many times will fate be second-guessed before this case is consigned to settled history?

Many ways. Many times.

It’s not always perfectly fair to the players, this desire to rewrite history after the fact. But it’s natural.

It’s a means of self-defense against chaos. If lessons aren’t drawn, we’re assuming terror is random and inevitable.

Before moving on, we must ask ourselves what should have been in an ideal world, which this one most assuredly was not.

What follows are the ways both or one of the girls — Amber Dubois and Chelsea King — might have survived if the world had taken a turn for the better.

• If only the science — or is it really a subjective art? — of predicting the potential danger of sexual predators were more exact, more definitive, John Albert Gardner III, identified by at least one psychologist as an unreformable monster, would be rotting in a prison cell and Amber would be looking forward to summer and the Del Mar Fair.

• If only Amber had stayed close to classmates as she walked to her nearby high school. Instead, as her mother learned from a jailhouse talk with Gardner, Amber took a circuitous route that left her alone and vulnerable, prey to a large, threatening man who forced her into his car.

• If only Amber’s mom had been successfully contacted within minutes of Amber not showing up at school and an “Amber Alert” had gone out within an hour. Maybe the SDG&E workers in Pala who may have seen Gardner and Amber would have read or heard the description of the 14-year-old girl — and foiled the murder.

Yes, I know. It’s magical thinking that police would have believed that Amber had been abducted and was not cutting class.

But you wish a mother’s intuition had been called into play. Just this once.

• If only Escondido detectives had not been thrown off in the Amber abduction by false leads involving a “doughy” dark-skinned boy and a red pickup. Both turned out to be awful red herrings.

Doubling down on the boy and the truck, investigators overlooked the registered sex offender living a mile or two away from Amber’s house. Without the false leads, they might have imposed a dragnet that would have turned up Gardner. Who knows what evidence might have been found in the sex offender’s car? Maybe he gets scared — and confesses.

• If only the San Diego Police Department had not assumed, months after Amber had disappeared, that a female jogger was mugged in December without the more serious intent to rape. (You’d think if there’s one person you don’t want to rob, it’s a runner.)

• If only the woman who hit Gardner in the nose and escaped had not left for Colorado, cutting lines of communication and allowing the terribly mischaracterized crime to drop into the circular file.

• If only Lake Hodges had been blanketed with an accurate artist’s sketch of the attacker, maybe with a bruised nose. With his picture all over the place, Gardner would never have hung out by the lake, playing with a rattlesnake and spooking hikers.

• If only Gardner’s mother, a member of a running club, had seen a poster in the San Dieguito River Park with a sketch of her son’s face. The truth about her twisted child, which she’d undoubtedly repressed through the well-publicized Amber search, might have suddenly dawned on her.

• If only the well-respected psychiatric nurse had then called the authorities, Chelsea King would be wearing around Poway High the sweatshirt of the college she’d elected to attend this fall.

As a final footnote, I like to think of Chelsea attending what was reported to be among her top choices, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

More than 30 years ago, I studied there and taught English lit to smart, earnest freshmen like Chelsea.

Taking time off from her studies, Chelsea would have loved running on fine days along the shore of Spanish Banks or in Stanley Park with snow-capped Whistler Mountain brooding in the distance.